Sunday, May 12, 2013

A folly of praise

In a section called "Advice on gifted education" at the website of the mathematician Terry Tao, there is a link to a well-written, convincingly documented 2007 article "How not to talk to your kids" in the New York magazine. It shows that praising children for their intelligence, instead of for the efforts they make, tends to make them lazy and supercilious - at best.

I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort.
Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you
can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

As it happens, I had left America around the time that force-feeding of self-esteem came into fashion in education there:

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in
which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most
important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can
to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad
societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was
axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting
goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red
pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved,
praise.

The psychologist Carol Dweck was one of the first to shake up this complacent fawning:

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they
are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey
conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think
it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the
New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the
number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually.
The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring
that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the
trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might
be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not
prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team
at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on
students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of
experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York
fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of
the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of
puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well.
Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his
score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into
groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how
sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line
might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second
round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the
first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from
attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an
easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90
percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

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